Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(25)

She was shaking her head before I finished.

“I’ve got too much going on,” she said. “This week we’re backgrounding candidates for the Mulholland Corridor Planning Board for the city, and I have the usual backlog from our steady clients.”

“Well, I guess all that pays the bills,” I said.

“Besides … I really don’t want to go down that path. That was the past, Jack.”

“But you were good at it, Rachel.”

“I was. But doing it this way … I think it will be too much of a reminder of that past. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve let it go.”

I looked at her, trying to get a read now myself. But she had always been a hard nut to crack. I was left to take her at her word but I wondered if the past she didn’t want to return to was more about me than the job she had left behind.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I should let you get back to it, then.”

I stood up and so did she. The shin-high coffee table was between us and I leaned across to engage in an awkward hug.

“Thanks, Rachel.”

“Anytime, Jack.”

I left the office and checked my phone as I walked down Main Street to the lot where I had left the Jeep. I had silenced it before going in to see Rachel and now saw that I had missed two calls from unknown numbers and had two new messages.

The first was from Lisa Hill.

“Stop harassing me.”

Short and simple, followed by the hang-up. This message led me to accurately guess who the second message was from before playing it. Detective Mattson used a few more words than Hill.

“McEvoy, if you want me to put together a harassment case against you, all you have to do is keep bothering Lisa Hill. Leave. Her. Alone.”

I erased both messages, my face burning with both indignation and humiliation. I was just doing my job, but it bothered me that neither Hill nor Mattson viewed it that way. To them I was some kind of intruder.

It made me all the more determined to find out what had happened to Tina Portrero and the three other women. Rachel Walling said she didn’t want to venture into the past. But I did. For the first time in a long time I had a story that had my blood moving with an addictive momentum. It was good to have that feeling back.





10

FairWarning did not have the budget for such niceties as the LexisNexis legal search engine. But William Marchand, the lawyer who was on the board of directors and reviewed all FairWarning stories for legal pitfalls, did have the service and offered it to our staff as just one of the many things he did for us gratis. His office, where he served most of his paying clients, was located on Victory Boulevard near the Van Nuys Civic Center and the side-by-side courthouses where he most often appeared on their behalf. I made my first stop there after leaving downtown.

Marchand was in court but his legal assistant, Sacha Nelson, was there and allowed me to sit next to her at her computer while she conducted a LexisNexis search to see if GT23 or its parent company and founding partners had ever been the subject of a lawsuit. I came across one pending action against the company and another that had been filed and dismissed when a settlement had been reached.

The pending case was a wrongful-termination claim filed by someone named Jason Hwang. The cause-of-action summary on the first page of the lawsuit stated that Hwang was a regulatory-affairs specialist who was fired when another employee claimed that he had fondled him during an encounter in the coffee room. Hwang denied the accusation and claimed to have been fired without the due process of a full internal investigation. The lawsuit stated that the sexual-harassment complaint was trumped up as a means of getting rid of Hwang because he had demanded strict adherence to company protocols regarding DNA testing and research. The lawsuit also stated that the alleged victim of the unwanted sexual contact was promoted to Hwang’s position after he was fired, a clear indication that the termination was unlawful.

What stood out to me in the filing was that Hwang did not work directly for GT23 at the company’s Palo Alto lab. He was technically an employee of Woodland Bio, an independent lab located in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles. Woodland Bio was described in the lawsuit as a GT23 subcontractor, a lab that handled some of the overflow demands of the mother company’s genetic testing. Hwang was suing the mother company because they had ultimate control over personnel decisions and that was also where the money was. Hwang was seeking $1.2 million in damages, saying his reputation had been ruined in the industry by the false accusation and no other company would hire him.

I asked Sacha to print out the lawsuit, which included a notifications page with the name and contact information for Hwang’s attorney, who was a partner in a downtown L.A. law firm. Sacha sensed my excitement.

“Good stuff?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “If the plaintiff or his lawyer will talk to me, it could lead to something.”

“Should we pull up the other case?”

“Yes, sure.”

I was sitting on a roller chair next to Sacha’s as she worked the keyboard. She was in her early forties, had been with Marchand for a long time, and I knew from previous conversations that she was going to law school at night while working in the office by day. She was attractive in a bookish, determined sort of way—pretty face and eyes hidden behind eyeglasses, never lipstick or any sign that she spent much time in front of a makeup mirror. She wore no rings or earrings and had an unconscious habit of hooking her short auburn hair behind her ears as she stared at the computer screen.